How do individuals shape societies? How do societies shape individuals? This paper develops a framework for studying the connections between micro and macro phenomena. The framework builds on two ingredients widely used in social science − population and variable. Starting with the simplest...

The goal of scientific work is to understand more and more by less and less. In this effort, theoretical unification plays a large part. There are two main types of theoretical unification – unification of different theories of the same field of phenomena and unification of theories of...

This paper proposes a new unified theory of sociobehavioral forces. The goal of the new theory is to integrate theories describing five sociobehavioral processes - comparison (including justice and self-esteem), status, power, identity, and happiness - bringing under a single theoretical...

This paper proposes a new model of wage determination and wage inequality. In this model, wage-setters set workers' wages; they do so either directly, as when individuals vote in a salary committee, or indirectly, as when political parties, via the myriad of social, economic, fiscal, and other...

Social scientists study two kinds of inequality: inequality between persons (as in income inequality) and inequality between subgroups (as in racial inequality). This paper analyzes the mathematical connections between the two kinds of inequality. The paper proceeds by exploring a set of...

This paper develops the mathematical foundations of comparison, referential, and relative (CRR) processes. The key ingredients are: (1) three kinds of terms; and (2) two kinds of relations. Combining the three terms - absolute amount, relative amount, and relative rank - with the two kinds of...

Recent work on social status led to derivation of a new continuous distribution based on the exponential. The new variate, termed the ring(2)-exponential, in turn leads to derivation of two closely-related new families of continuous distributions, which we call the mirrorexponential and the...

This paper proposes a comprehensive, path-independent decomposition formula of changes into ceteris paribus effects and interaction effects. The formula implies a reassessment of sequential decomposition methods that are widely used in the literature and that are restrictive in how they treat...

We use income satisfaction data in order to estimate equivalence scales. Our method differs from previous attempts to use satisfaction data for this purpose in that it can be used to estimate or evaluate any given parametric equivalence scale. It can also be employed to investigate specific...

This paper describes procedures for measuring and estimating the fundamental quantities in the study of distributive justice. We examine a variety of methods for measuring the actual reward and the just reward, for both self and other, including direct and indirect methods for measuring the just...